Sentimentally Blacksmithing Mathematician
by OpheliaBlack
Summary: As the dust of the Samhain struggle settles over Bixby, smoke rises when Dess and Rex decide to construct going-away presents for their fellow midnighters.


It is often the custom of a polymath to become deeply and blindly engrossed in one's work, and when Dess' mother knocked quietly on her daughter's door to announce a visitor, Dess had not looked up until her oldest friend was already standing before her. He wears his usual black trench coat and sunglasses, but his almost sheepish smile is new and unwelcome.

"Hey, Dess," Rex says, raising a hand in greeting. Her first instinct is irritation; Rex knew better than to interrupt her while she was working. Before she can scold him, however, he raises his other hand, now in a gesture of surrender. "Thought I'd drop by while I was in the neighborhood, I can go if you want."

Dess snorts, knowing perfectly well that nobody ever willingly passes through her neighborhood. "Nah, you're already here. Might as well pitch in." She waves him in, and he crosses the threshold carefully, looking around the once familiar room with his new predator's gaze. She watches, frowning, as his eyes linger over the shining steel that covers every wall and window, worked into intricate thirteen-pointed shapes. Rex himself had selected and approved all of the metal that had ever gone through her workshop, yet the very sight of it seemed to overwhelm him.

"I'm making some toys for the guys to take with them," she explains, sweeping an arm broadly over her cluttered work bench. "It's all stuff they've worked with before, more for the memories than anything else. I don't know if they'll need much protection out there." Arrayed before her are a dagger with a wicked nine-inch blade (thirteen inches was, regrettably, out of her meager budget), a heavy-duty flashlight, and a long spiral of steel. Rex gives the items only a brief glance before giving Dess a thumbs up, the seal of approval for clean metal.

She rifles through a stack of papers before withdrawing a page covered in ancient numerals, which she smooths out and pushes towards him before taking up a pair of wire cutters. "Can you copy these all right?" She had only bothered to write the patterns down for Jessica's sake; had it really been only a few weeks ago that they had stood together in this room? And that had been the same night when…

She swallows, and glances up at Rex, who is looking over the sheet. "Well, it won't be easy. It's all Greek to me." She hardly opens her mouth before he shakes his head. "Just a joke, Dess. I know it's Phoenician, and the Greek alphabet was derived from it. You really think I don't know history anymore?"

"Ok, you can look at the numbers, but can you handle the metal?" His smile vanishes, and Dess tries to hold back a sigh with little success. "You can't make the markings, give the names, or touch the equipment. Why not spend this time with Melissa?"

He grimaces, but it's not enough to cover the flash of hurt that steals across him. "She told me to leave. Said I was too distracting." _Ah, there it is._

"So you came here?"

"Well, I figured my other options were to see the old man or the old woman. It's nice to make an easy choice for once."

She puts down her wire cutters and faces him, her expression solemn. "I'm honored," she says in a low voice, bowing low. Rex makes a scathing noise, and Dess laughs and returns to her task, neatly clipping a spool of wire into carefully measured segments. Her soldering iron is already heated, secure on its stand a generous arm's reach away.

Rex sighs. "I'm really going to miss her, you know." Dess doesn't have to ask who he means. "It's just… this place is going to be so different with just the two of us. I know you weren't all that close, but we had something good, didn't we?"

Dess closes her eyes. _Yeah, we sure did. The three of us, we ran this town. _"Melissa did what she had to. It's not her fault she was born a mindcaster." Really, nobody wished that it was not so more dearly than Melissa did. Glancing towards Rex, Dess sees that he seems to be looking at her with something akin to respect. _Well, we can't have that. Don't get sappy on me._ She smirks and shrugs her shoulders. "Of course, it is her fault that she was born a bitch. Wouldn't kill her to smile every once in a while, would it?"

Rex raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, why can't she be more upbeat, like you?"

"Exactly!" Dess gives him her widest smile, and the momentary discomfort in her stretched cheeks is worth the laugh she pulls out of Rex. He grins in return, and hers fades quickly as she counts far too many teeth. _Trick of the light, Dess. There are only thirty-two, the darklings didn't stuff extra teeth into him._ Still, she cannot help but look away, faster than she would like to admit.

Music plays quietly as she returns to her work, an old album from some punk rock band that stubbornly refused to set foot in Oklahoma every time they toured. Somewhere under her bed were CDs she had burned from Melissa's collection, who preferred the loudest, heaviest metal she could get her gloved hands on. They had been carefully selected for their ability to block out the mind-noise of Bixby High, but Dess found them helpful in shielding herself from the mundane variety of unwelcome thoughts. With Rex watching her with the energy of a caged wolf, restless but unable to join in her activity, she wondered if it was time to dust one of them off.

Fortunately, before long Rex had taken to lounging on her bed as she worked, entertaining himself with a stack of National Geographic magazines. To his delight, one issue included an article on an archaeological dig in Montana, and he read it aloud with his own expansive commentary worthy of a museum exhibit. The afternoon passes into evening and the evening passes into night before Dess puts the soldering iron down.

Rex looks up from his magazine. "I'm naming Melissa's," he declares, bounding over and snatching the blade off the table.

Dess peers at him through the wisps of smoke from the iron. "Are you sure you can handle that?" Rex nods, but his hand shakes slightly as he withdraws a battered scrap of paper from his pocket, upon which a single word had been written.

"Step back from the table," she commands. "If you lose it and damage my equipment, you're buying the replacements."

He laughs softly, but does as he's told. _Ah, so a seer can follow orders. Looks like we can teach an old Rex new tricks._ "I've got about six bucks to my name. How much solder does that buy?"

"Not enough," she says, waving him further back. Her bedroom is not a large one, and it only takes a few steps before his back hits the far wall and threatens to smear the calculations from her chalkboards. "So, let's hear that name. How do you say goodbye to your girlfriend in thirteen letters?"

She had meant to sound lighthearted, but Rex's eyes are sad when they meet hers. "You don't. Best you can do is make her laugh." He holds up the dagger between two fingers, as though contaminated, and takes a deep breath. "Apocalyptical," he proclaims, and Dess rushes forward to snatch the blade from him as he doubles over from the blow of the word. His hands twist into claws, and he breathes heavily through his nose.

"I'm fine," he says, his voice low and calm despite his heaving shoulders. He remains hunched, his hands braced against his thighs as though recovering from a marathon. "Go on, name the other two."

Dess gives a nod that he doesn't see, and reaches over the workbench to lay a hand on the flashlight. "Electrocuting," she whispers, eyes on her friend, but he does not seem to react. She speaks in a normal volume for Jonathan's shield, "Antigravities," and Rex gives only a shiver. "I'm done," she announces, unnecessarily.

Twenty-eight seconds pass before he straightens again. To her surprise, he looks pleased with himself, a familiar expression that Dess never thought she could miss. "That went well, didn't it? Three Aversions in a row."

"_That_ went well?" She looks at him carefully, but he seems like normal old Rex. At least, as normal as he can get, these days. Dess had done her best to forget the strange transformations that had come over him, sweeping through like a storm and leaving a shattered halfling behind. What else could she have done? What could any of them have done? _Damn you, Melissa. Leaving him now, of all times._

"Why aren't you going with them? There's nothing here for us anymore."

He shrugs. "I've got to stay and watch my dad and Madeline. What about you?"

"I've got to stay and watch you."

She had expected to say that she was only waiting until she finished high school, then she'd be out the door so fast she wouldn't hear it slam shut. But corny as they were, she finds that the words that had come out instead were true. Who had ever heard of a seer working alone? When Madeline had seen that prospect when Rex was born, had she not immediately begun pulling her mindcaster strings to gather him a troupe of orphan midnighters? The math couldn't have been simpler, when all she needed was to count to one and realize it wasn't enough.

He gives a humorless laugh, his teeth too sharp and shiny. "Watch me? Madeline thinks I've forgotten who I am. You're one of my oldest and best friends, Dess. Do you agree with her?"

She sighs. "Sometimes I do. It's not your fault, but sometimes…" Words evade her, and she gestures vaguely instead. She hears an echo of his voice, old and dry and terrible, and all too recent. _They're coming for you, don't you see?_

"My name is Rex Greene, and I am _human_," he says firmly, eyes flashing a dangerous indigo that spites his declaration.

"Yeah," she says quietly. "Yeah, you are." He nods slowly, sitting back on her bed and resting his head in his hands. When he remains in his position, she cautiously returns to the bench. Uncertain what else to do with herself, she begins buffing the shield with a jewelry polishing cloth she had borrowed from her mother.

"Dess?" She makes a noncommittal noise of acknowledgement, but he does not continue until she looks over at him. He stands tall and grave, his face cloaked in shadow as he bows his head. "We should have looked for you sooner," he says, his voice low and regretful. She sighs. _Yeah, you should have._

"Does it matter anymore?"

"Maybe not. But I've been thinking about it. It helps sometimes, you know, to think about things like that."

She snorts. "What, about dumb decisions you made as a kid?"

"No, not quite," Rex says thoughtfully. "More like, thinking about things that hold real human emotion to them. Regret is one of them, sure, but so's love, and friendship. Darklings don't have friends, but I do."

_Yeah, and they're all leaving Bixby, and you're stuck trying to cozy up to me. _Bitterness wells within her, and for a moment she thinks she tastes a burst of metal on her tongue, the way that Melissa always described. She lets it seep into her words, and feels some small victory at the surprised expression on Rex's face. "Truly heartwarming. You should sell the rights to that story, put another six bucks in your pocket." _Nobody's buying my story anytime soon. Desdemona Flood, the Permanent Second Choice, in theaters now. But only if everything else is sold out._

Whether cowed into silence, or having simply said all he had wanted to, Rex continues to watch in silence as Dess works. There is little else to be done to prepare the gifts after they had received their names, but she is hardly eager to witness whatever emotional display the others had in store for their final farewell. _It's not like they can't call or email, or just come visit. If thousands of years of darkling attacks and mindcaster bullshit couldn't wipe this town out, nothing will._

Despite her best efforts to ward away sentimentality, however, a story of her friends comes to mind, spurred on by Rex's half-formed apology. "I remember the midnight when I first saw you two. When you finally came looking for me, but I found you first." Dess shakes her head, frowning, the clicks of her necklaces swinging together too loud in her ears. "I thought you were darklings. And I wondered what that said about me, if my worst nightmare was other humans."

"That's what Melissa's would have been, no question. She would not have thought anything of it."

"And you?"

"Well, there hadn't been any human-shaped darklings in the lore, but –"

Dess laughs. "Ah, the lore! You haven't been talking about the lore enough lately, Rex, I was starting to think Maddy had replaced you with someone else while we weren't looking."

Rex doesn't laugh; it's too close to what actually happened. Looking to gloss over the uncomfortable moment, Dess plows on with her story, eyes fixed on the gleaming metal before her.

"I was following you, as you tracked a darkling. But it had a friend that I wasn't expecting. I had gotten cornered, and in you two swooped to save me." She allows herself a little smile. "But I already had a weapon." She had not known that at the time, of course. Only that she clutched a butter knife in her sweaty palm, a precaution taken by a young girl who feared the large, sharp knives of her kitchen as much as any potential assailant would. But when the two midnighters came upon her, Dess had called to them that she was armed, though she doubted the blade's effectiveness.

That final word had been enough to send the darkling flying back in a show of blue sparks.

She closes her eyes, and the afterimage of those years old embers seem to flash behind her eyes as though she had just seen them again in the darkness. It was always her favorite part of a scuffle, the fireworks display that proved the power of her weapons.

When her eyes open, she sees Rex nodding. "It was humans working together that drove back the darklings," he murmurs.

"And fire."

"And fire," he agrees. He puts a hand on his chin and looks up at the ceiling, apparently thinking hard. "You know what?" he muses. "I bet… we could drive them out for good if we had a friend who could carry the fire to them."

"Don't be ridiculous, Rex. What kind of power would that be, some kind of flame-bringer?" His serious expression shatters, and relief fills Dess to see him able to joke and laugh again so much in one evening. It had been a long time since the seer had been able to relax, and with Melissa skipping town, it might be a long time before he can do so again.

She looks at the clock on her wall, whose time she had begun to carefully synchronize with Geostationary once a week. "Well, the Nostalgia Express leaves at midnight, we'll need to wrap it up. We still have about…" she pauses, "1586 seconds. 13 times 122."

Rex glances at the clock as well. "About 26 minutes, but we still need to get to Jess's house. And that's another multiple of 13, so it's really time to go," he adds.

Dess rolls her eyes. "Don't try to put me out of a job, now." She swipes their haul into her backpack and swings it over her shoulder, Rex's laughter in her ears as they depart.


End file.
